Adding fonts

Packages

Fonts can be added system-wide to Debian by installing the appropriate package; fonts are specified in the “Fonts” section. As default system-wide fonts will be installed into /usr/share/fonts by the package-manager.

Notes:

For most uses, you’ll want TrueType (TTF) and OpenType (OTF) fonts – these packages start with fonts-, ttf- or otf-.

Some non-free font downloader packages are in contrib, which you will need to add to your sources if not present.

Manually

Install a font manually by downloading the appropriate .ttf or otf files and placing them into /usr/local/share/fonts (system-wide), ~/.local/share/fonts (user-specific) or ~/.fonts (user-specific). These files should have the permission 644 (-rw-r--r--), otherwise they may not be usable.

Run fc-cache to update the font cache (add -v for verbose output). he above mentioned paths can be customized in the fontconfig configuration file at /etc/fonts/fonts.conf – you can also include subdirectories or links, which is useful if you have a directory of fonts on a separate hard drive (or partition or other location).

If you are installing bit map fonts you might need to enable this with dpkg-reconfigure:

# dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config

Then enable bit maps font in the third screen.

GNOME users can simply open a Nautilus window to fonts:// and drag&drop the font files in there.

You can verify the fonts are present by looking for them in an application (such as a word processor), or by using the command fc-list. A python based graphical utility, font-manager, is also available to preview all installed and available fonts.

Configuration

fontconfig is the underlying configuration tool; you may find the following programs useful:

fc-list – lists fonts

fc-match -s helvetica – show an ordered list of fonts matching a certain name or pattern

Commonly Used Fonts

The fonts-liberation (ttf-liberation in squeeze) package supplies fonts with the same metrics as Times, Arial and Courier. These fonts are named Liberation and are present in most cases. If you require the non-free original Microsoft fonts the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package (in contrib) can be used to obtain them.

Font design and formats

Source Font Formats

Generating Fonts from Source

The upstream build system should always be used for generating fonts. If upstream does not have a build system, then it is a good idea to contribute one to them based on the following Free Software tools.

The fontforge is an editor for outline and bitmap fonts that generates all kinds of fonts. It is also scriptable and has an addon tool xgridfit for hinting. Fonts using these tools can be found using these commands: